The Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC) is pleased to announce the release of the AutomatedRetrieval Console (ARC). ARC is an open source Java-based toolkit designed to automate and streamline the processes of clinical information retrieval (i.e., natural language processing, information extraction, concept mapping, machine learning, etc.).

We designed ARC with a few goals in mind. Our first goal is to allow users to achieve acceptable levels of performance with no custom software or rules development between tasks. Instead, ARC automatically and iteratively evaluates combinations of NLP output with supervised machine learning classification algorithms. Our second goal is to free up developers and IR researchers to focus on improving the science and technology by empowering end users to take over many of the processes of IR. Finally, we hope to meet these goals by building upon and contributing to a growing collection of open source IR software.

To allow us to remain focused on streamlining the processes of clinical IR, this first release of ARC takes on document-level information retrieval. Interested users can download ARC with a with a simple UIMA pipeline from our Google Code site or, thanks to the generous cooperation of the National Library of Medicine, users can download ARC with a full version of Dr. Guergana Savova's cTAKES, complete with UMLS-based knowledge base. For machine learning, this version of ARC ships with Dr. Andrew McCallum's Machine Learning for Language Toolkit (MALLET).

ARC development was made possible by the generous support of the Veterans Health Administration Office of Research and Development's Cooperative Studies Program and the Health Services Research and Development program's Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR).